The KDE Community has released a first beta of version 4.8 of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC). Aimed at testers, the development preview of the next major update to the open source K Desktop Environment brings changes to the Plasma Workspaces, applications and underlying platform, as well as various performance and stability improvements.

KDE SC 4.8 Beta 1 includes support for Qt Quick in Plasma Workspaces. The device notifier widget, now written in pure QML, has been ported using the new Plasma Components – a standardised API implementation that has a "native Plasma Look and Feel". To improve performance and scalability, while updating its appearance, the file view in Dolphin has also been rewritten. The developers note that, as the API, dependency and feature freezes are in effect, the team is now focusing "on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality".

KDE is licensed under a combination of the LGPLv2, BSD, MIT and X11 licences for core libraries and the GPLv2 or GPLv3 for applications. The current stable release is KDE SC 4.7.3 from earlier this month. (via)